Outputs and Uses of the Survey of Residential and Nursing Home Care of Elderly People

There is considerable potential in the survey of residential and nursing homes care for a number of valuable analyses withimportant policy implications. The latter are not discussed in any depth here as this paper represents a first step in clarifying the planned and potential uses of the survey data. Before considering these it is helpful to summarise the data available and timing of collections. On completion the three part survey of residential and nursing home care of elderly people will yield two principal datasets: a longitudinal data set containing information about 2,500 people admitted to publicly funded residential and nursing home care in 18 local authorities between October 1995 and January 1996; and a cross-sectional data set containing information about approximately 600 homes and 12,000 residents of homes in 21 local authorities in November 1996.For the longitudinal data set information has been collected to date about the household, dependency, and financialcharacteristics of admissions; mortality and location one month after admission; and mortality, location and dependencycharacteristics six months after admission. Further follow-ups identifying mortality, location and dependency characteristics of survivors are planned for 18 months, 30 months and 42 months after admission. For those leaving residential care information is being collected about reasons for leaving, location, dependency, and service receipt at each wave. The cross-sectional data collection is currently underway. The data set will contain information about the dependency andfunding arrangements of a random sample of up to 20 permanent and 20 short-stay residents in each of the homes andmanagement, policies, physical characteristics, services provided and quality of care in the homes. Information aboutdependency characteristics has been collected on the same basis as for the longitudinal survey. The potential value of these data sets is considerable. If a good proportion of the homes that individuals in the longitudinalsurvey were admitted to are also in the cross-sectional survey then it is planned to link the two data sets, which will further add to the value of the data collected. The planned and potential outputs from the data sets fall into three categories: those that fall within the commissioned project; those that feed into other projects and streams of work; and those for which there are no resources currently committed